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Pontiac handed Hal Needham four Trans Ams to destroy for Smokey and the Bandit, and three of them did not survive filming. The fourth finished the shoot so beaten that crew had to push it into position. That wreckage turned a slow-selling coupe into Pontiac’s best seller and made Burt Reynolds inseparable from a black and gold Firebird. Here is what really happened behind the scenes, and what those cars command today.
Only twelve people ever ordered a 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T with a 426 Hemi and a convertible top — and just five came with a manual transmission, like this Plum Crazy Purple example from the Brothers Collection. The factory fender tag tells the whole story, down to the exact rear gear ratio and interior trim code. See how V8TV verifies a claim this rare, one code at a time.
Eleanor is one of the most recognizable Mustangs on earth, and almost nothing about it is what people assume. It was never a factory Shelby, the name was borrowed from an earlier film, and Shelby American never built a 1967 GT500 convertible for the public at all. That makes a drop-top Eleanor a custom built on top of a custom. Read on for the design history, the production reality, and the copyright fight it triggered.
A quiet fall on the local car show calendar usually means one of two things, and for the 2017 season, the answer became clear fast. Winter and spring brought a packed slate of shows back, and the crowd showing up looked different than longtime attendees expected. Read on to find out who was actually filling these events.
The same man has owned this 1955 Chevrolet for forty-one years. Nine of those years went into a build that started out as a drag car and quietly turned into something else entirely, ending up with 1,250 horsepower, a fully custom interior, and a father-and-son story attached to it. The Pro Street stance it wears is not a random styling choice. Read on to find out what it is actually quoting.
FCA filed a trademark on the Cuda name, and the easy reaction was to dismiss it as routine housekeeping. What made this one worth a second look was the filing classification covering badges and decals, plus the fact that the company had already trademarked Barracuda a couple of years earlier. Two filings in a row is a pattern, not paperwork. Here is what the name is worth, and what would have to happen for it to return.
Lokar’s Muscle Car Shifter Knob is built to replicate the look and feel of a factory GM shifter closely enough to fool most people at a car show, and it won SEMA’s award for Best New Interior Accessory Product. The install is quick but order-dependent: the shifter must be in Park, the set screw inside the knob stays untouched, and the adapter housing has to be held steady while tightening. Read on for exactly how to avoid the mistakes first-timers make.
ScottieDTV found this 1966 Chevrolet Caprice at the 2017 NSRA Street Rod Nationals South in Knoxville, and the mods are almost invisible — a seamlessly grafted Big Block Chevelle hood, a Ridetech air suspension that lays the car nearly on the ground, and a Tuned Port Injection 350 under the hood. It’s a full-size cruiser built with more restraint than flash, and the comment section calls it one of the best Caprice builds anyone’s seen. Watch to see the details up close.
A 1982 Corvette showing up in Iceland is far less strange than it sounds once you know what that model year actually was. It was the last C3 ever built, the first Corvette with electronic fuel injection, the only one offered exclusively with an automatic, and, as a Collector Edition, the first to break $20,000 and the first with an opening rear hatch. Chevrolet built 25,407 of them. Read on to find out why it deserves a second look.
The car chases people still talk about have one thing in common: almost nothing about them was faked. Real drivers, real streets, real risk, and in several cases real crashes that stayed in the final cut. From a 1968 Mustang tearing through San Francisco to a Peterbilt stalking a Plymouth Valiant through the desert, here is what made each of these sequences work and why CGI has never quite replaced them.
Tom Scarpello ran Ford’s Special Vehicle Team from 1998 to 2004, then founded a company to answer the question he kept hearing at car shows: why not just build the original Mustang again? Revology does not restore old cars. It builds new ones on officially licensed reproduction bodies, powered by Ford’s modern Coyote V8, with modern steering, brakes, wiring, and air conditioning. Here is what that actually gets you, and what it costs.
A stock Dodge Hellcat’s factory tires look aggressive enough to pass for an aftermarket upgrade, but every size on every trim rolled off the assembly line exactly as Dodge specified it. From the original 2015 car’s 275/40ZR20s to the Super Stock’s massive 315-width rear tires, the rubber underneath a Hellcat does as much work as the supercharged Hemi on top of it. Read on to find out exactly how much of a Hellcat’s quarter-mile time comes down to what’s bolted to the wheels.
Visal Chum first saw an Acura NSX as a teenager and didn’t stop thinking about it until he finally tracked down this 1992 Formula Red example decades later. Lou Costabile catches up with him at a Chicago car show to talk about the search, the patience it took, and why he calls the NSX ‘the purest sports car.’ Watch the full conversation above.
One car chase filmed across San Francisco in 1968 did more for the second-generation Dodge Charger than any advertising campaign ever could. The villains’ black R/T was not a movie prop built for the occasion. It was a production car anyone could order, with a 440 Magnum standard and a 426 HEMI on the option sheet. Read on for what the R/T package actually included, and why real ones still chase movie-car money.
The P code on this 1956 Fairlane Sunliner’s data plate identifies the Thunderbird Special, a 312-cubic-inch V8 with a four-barrel carburetor rated at 225 horsepower, the strongest engine Ford offered that year. Pulled from a private California collection and wearing correct Bermuda Blue and Diamond Blue paint, it is a documented top-tier car rather than another dressed-up convertible. Here is what that code actually bought.